Apple Music

On Monday Apple announced its streaming music app. There has been a lot of talk about this , and now finally at the end of June Apple Music will be going live. There seems to be a lot of excitement about the human-curated playlists. I’m still bit doubtful how much better that is going to be, but I have hope 🙂 This is what Apple had to say about it: “Curation is the soul of every playlist created on Apple Music. Apple has hired the most talented music experts from around the world, dedicated to creating the perfect playlists based on your preferences, and they become better curators the more you listen.” Now that would be a job!

They also will have 24/7 online Radio service, which I would expect to be a big success. In fact, as this will be a global radio station, it might have quite a lot of influence on what makes the charts in the future.

There will also be social feature called Apple Music Connect. And from what I understand, this allows the artist to post content, including videos, lyrics, photos, songs and comments. This definitely is a feature I was missing in Spotify.

On it’s launch June 30th it will be in over 100 countries! Now that is impressive. If you want your music to be available, you can’t really argue with that. The price will be around the same as the Spotify paid subscription service, but they also have a very competitive family price.

So what does this mean to the artist? Well if your music is on iTunes, you can already claim your artist page. Read more about this HERE. Yeah we can argue about how much streaming is killing music, or we can go where the music fan goes. I’ll leave that deception up to you.

I am definitely intrigued about the Apple Music. I like the fact that they are including direct artist and fan engagement opportunities. Let’s not forget that apple is a big player. The latest info was that Spotify has over 15 million subscribers, while Apple’s target is 100 million subscribers. Lets not forget Apple has an existing customer base, but it remains to be seen whether it will convert. But Apple definitely revolutionised how we consumed music with iTunes, and even they are bit slow to get in to the streaming game, it would not surprise me if years to come they would rule the game.

Also a small note to the musicians that have been complaining about Spotify (I was one of them in the early days), Spotify always claimed that the artists payments will rise after the paid subscriptions rise. Apple will not have a free service, even though they offer first three months for free. So I would expect the payout to musicians to be larger in the long run, but whether it will be, that remains to be seen.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE